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Direct Brain Recordings Showing Neural Prioritization of Speech Over Music in Children
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Rajvi Agravat1,2, Maansi Desai2, Gabrielle Foox3, Alyssa Field2, Sandra Georges3, Jacob Leisawitz3, Anne Anderson3, Dave Clarke4, Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara4, Howard Weiner3, Liberty Hamilton1,2,4; 1Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, The University of Texas at Austin, 2Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin, 3Texas Children's Hospital / Baylor College of Medicine, 4Dell Children's Medical Center / Dell Medical School
Our brains are constantly filtering sounds. How does the brain solve the ‘cocktail party problem’ seamlessly, sometimes even without conscious effort? While extensively studied in adults, understanding how these auditory processing mechanisms develop and mature throughout childhood remains a critical gap in our knowledge. Using intracranial stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), we investigated this implicit auditory attention question by presenting 52 pediatric participants (ages 4-22, 29M/23F, over 8000 electrodes total, with over 800 temporal lobe electrodes total) with audiovisual movie trailers that contained both speech and music. Our naturalistic approach provides critical insights into real-world auditory processing beyond traditional laboratory paradigms. We extracted and analyzed high gamma band activity (70-150 Hz) to index local neural firing. Data were analyzed using a computational source-separated encoding analysis. We used deep neural networks to decompose the mixed speech-music stimuli into isolated speech and music components, then built separate encoding models for each condition (speech only, music only, and original speech-music mixture). Although the participants heard only the original speech-music mixture, we found that brain activity in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), Heschl’s gyrus (HG), and superior temporal sulcus (STS) was significantly better predicted using speech-only models (p<0.001) suggesting preferential and early encoding of speech even with competing music. Analysis of age-related effects revealed a significant relationship between age and speech correlations in STG (p<0.001), indicating that the pediatric brain demonstrates an intrinsic neural bias toward socially relevant auditory information that emerges early and strengthens throughout development. Our findings demonstrate how different brain regions implicitly attend to specific components of mixed auditory streams, with specialized temporal lobe networks enabling the separation and processing of speech and music simultaneously, even in the absence of explicit attentional directives. This suggests that selective attention processing in implicit attentional scenarios may emerge as an inherent neural capability, rather than a purely conscious, top-down mechanism. These results have significant implications for understanding developmental communication disorders and may inform targeted therapeutic interventions for children with auditory processing deficits.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Language Development/Acquisition